Jesus will come soon. (Matthew 24: 1-3 (David Jeremiah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q710SSEyQy8) Look around you. What do you see and hear every night on the nightly news?
Recently the Representative who sponsored the 123 Bill in the House of Representatives was elected leader of the majority party (Republican) of that august House. And so the consequences of putting school psychologists in every school, the purpose of that bill, begins. Just what do these psychologists believe and even if they don't what MUST they support?
All of this will be a part of the Comprehensive sex education agenda to pollute the minds of our children beginning in Kindergarten. You have lost the moral authority as parents. Both the Counselor’s Handbook and the BCPS mental health guidebook, “Mental Health Matters: Everyone has a Story,” suggest the Trevor Project and other LGBTQ+ organizations as a resource.
In another document provided by BCPS, titled “2022-2023 School Counselors’ Handbook,” confidentiality between student and counselor is thoroughly stressed.
Just imagine the images that your innocent child will be influenced by through their efforts. "Further, the training manual states the counselor’s “duty to self” is to “develop knowledge and understanding of historic and systemic oppression, social justice and cultural models (e.g., multicultural counseling, anti-racism, culturally sustaining practices) to further develop skills for systemic change and equitable outcomes for all students.” (Equity is NOT equality! Equity means equality of Outcome not opportunity.)
Whether this will be published on my own blog is questionable. I am not sure what post this notice refers to.
I am seriously considering ending my education activism. When I first began battling Whole Language in the early 90s, after seeing how many illiterate middle schoolers I had in my classrooms, I really thought the teachers in Dothan would join with me to battle this foolishness. Recently Judith Hanford, an investigative journalist produced a podcast that is an expose of this ridiculous "method" of reading instruction that actually teaches children "how not to read." (http://www.soldastory.org)
What happened in Dothan was a Whole Language hootenanny at the Dothan City School Board led by Dr. Patty Fritchie, the reading instructor at Troy State University. I do wish Judith Hanford could have been there to hear and see teachers supporting this method that had principals demanding that good/successful teachers leave their phonics books outside the door to be destroyed. The Hootenanny occurred when a group of parents (my husband and me included) flew an expert from a successful school that was 90% Black, served 3 housing projects, and had 40 identified dyslexics each year. The principal was given a mandate to improve that schools scores and he took a group of grudging teachers to participate in a seminar in learning the Systematic, Intensive, Direct and Early Method, The Writing Road to Reading, developed by Romalda Spalding a colleague of Dr. Samuel Orton founder of the Orton Dyslexia Society. Dr. Orton calls most dyslexia "school induced." After one year the scores in that school rose from the 25th percentile to the 80th, the number of identified dyslexics dropped from 40 to less than 5, and discipline problems declined.
My detractors will say everything I write is sour grapes because I was defeated in my run for Chairman of the Dothan City School Board where I refused donations because I did not want to be obligated to anyone. Twice. The campaign for the opposition was run out of the central office I was told by someone who was there. In the meantime, a local obstetrician who "had a heart for the children" and the president of Troy University became chairman of the Dothan City School Board and so everything the Director of Instruction and fellow "progressives" wanted got rubber stamped -- and still does. It is a circle the wagon mentality in education today. Don't rock the boat. Or as one principal of a very unsuccessful school put it, "Let's not get anybody hurt here." Losing one's retirement by going against the crowd isn't a wise move.
And though the reading scores reveal the failure, more money gets spent on programs like Reading Recovery as discussed by Judith Hanford. Each child who cannot read thinks they are defective. Their remediation in the school is more intensive more of the same. Parents who can afford it get private tutoring. Those who can't have children who follow year after year of depression and failure and probably drop out early.
Unfortunately, the legislators cannot legislate success in Math when the math instructors in the colleges of education pretty much do what the reading instructors do--teach how not to do math (successfully that is). Social Justice Math is more important than real Math instruction.
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is integrated into every subject in the Curriculum.
Oh, and during that time, with the debate over Goals 2000 and OBE/Mastery Learning/Outcomes Based Education (now called Equity) David Hornbeck (who wrote the Alabama First document promoted by A Plus, a clone of the Kentucky document) rewrote the Bylaws of Dothan City Schools replacing sequential learning with thematic learning. The Goals 2000 document also forbade drill and repetition (which Bear Bryant thankfully ignored). Phonics was kicked out and contemptuously labeled "drill and kill." Memorizing Addition/Subtraction/Multiplication/Division tables was now considered old fashioned so our children suffered through New Math and its later renamed clones. History Classes were shifted to Social Studies and the thematic lessons foreshadowed Critical Race Theory.
Social Emotional Learning now includes Eastern Meditation and the access to books the gatekeepers of the past would never have allowed in our libraries. And now, since I made them public, I no longer have access to them. But, Dothan City School students do. Oh yes, welcome to Comprehensive Sex Education beginning in Kindergarten. Words, activities, and pictures most of us have never seen or heard (and wish we would never see or hear) are now a part of the comprehensive education of students in Alabama schools.
And then we have Common Core ironically created and promoted by the Chicago purveyors of Progressive Politics making schools bee hives of community activism: Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Barach Obama (who attended Saul Alinsky's schools on community activism paid for by a Chicago pedophile priest Cardinal Bernardin), Arne Duncan (US Superintendent of Education) and David Coleman who worked with Ayers and Obama on the Chicago Annenberg Project, and destroyed education in Chicago.
Coleman claims to have produced Common Core. His philosophy? "These standards are the most serious attempt this country has yet made to come to grips with those early sources of inequality." So now with a salary of over a million a year he heads the College Boards.
The same passion that brought Patty Fritche's Whole Language Stepford Teachers to the Dothan City School Board to yell down the words of the Principal from the successful school teaching phonics ought to bring the same passion for getting rid of it! And reclaim our schools for the sake of our children!
But that won't happen and I am tired of banging my head against the wall of apathy.
Pray for Rick Rehm. He seems to be the only elected politician who actually understands what is happening here. All of us have family/friends employed by the school system. If they realize what is happening they dare not rock the boat if they want the retirement benefits for which they have worked so hard. If they don't it is because all of this comes from the colleges of education and the Department of Education that has been taken over by they purveyors of "Progressivism".
New World Order? One world religion? Guess what is happening every day in our schools. Do you ever wonder how Germany, a Christian nation, could succumb to the commands of the Nazi party, the Third Reich and produce the holocaust? It begins in the schools.
See also:
The word Requiem came to me first thing this Sunday morning as I said good morning to my Lord and prepared for Church. I am sure there is a reason God wanted me to use that word as a title for this post. I also think there is a warning there.
The bigotry of low expectations has replaced excellence in education. Social justice is not the cure. You will be told that parents who care have snatched their children out of public schools and put them in private schools and the public schools are left to deal with those with special needs.
The schools are creating the special needs with its educational malpractice and social justice malfeasance. Of course, there is a very small percentage of children with true dyslexia (according to Dr. Samuel Orton, founder of the Orton Dyslexia Society) and physical handicaps, but the immense amount of school induced dyslexia and consequential violence comes from the miseducation (see Pete Hegseth's book and series on Fox) that has come from the radical Left now running the NEA/AEA, Department of Education, and the colleges of education.
